REIGN OF TERROR Charged: How the Police Try to Suppress Protest.

 

REIGN OF TERROR

Charged: How the Police Try to Suppress Protest. By Matt Foot and Morag Livingston, published by Verso (£18.99 RRP)

This is a highly informative book investigation examining a series of protest events dating back over four decades, exposing gross state abuses by the police and legal system, government and politicians of all major parties.

It is essential reading today because the government has given the police frightening new powers which they expect them to use against trade unionists and other progressive organisations fighting back against the cost of living crisis, rising inequality and the loss of rights at work. Ironically, it means the right to effectively protest will only be maintained by protesting!

There is a long history here going back to 1968 when the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was started within the Metropolitan Police (Met) to spy on tens of thousands of citizens.

But things began to get really nasty during the decade of Thatcher – the 1980s.

Following widespread rioting in 1981 in St Pauls in Bristol, Toxteth in Liverpool and Brixton in London, Willie Whitelaw, Conservative Home Secretary, commissioned Lord Scarman, who had a liberal reputation from chairing previous inquiries of disorder, to undertake an inquiry into the causes . Scarman was to recommend greater community policing and Whitelaw backed him.

Secretly though, Whitelaw and the under pressure Thatcher government – whose destruction of major industries had sent unemployment rocketing - were gearing up through Kenneth Oxford, the new Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) leader, to import policing tactics. These had been refined during Britain’s many colonial experiences. An officer from Hong Kong there, where paramilitary methods were employed for crowd control, presented a manual, which was warmly welcomed, to ACPO’s annual conference.

What was happening was the most significant shift in policing strategy in over a century. Yet it was never even debated in Parliament.

The new rules only came to light during the 1985 Orgreave trials of striking miners charged with riot ‘when defence barrister Michael Mansfield’s forensic cross-examination of ACC Anthony Clement’ revealed them. Clement claimed the manual did not cover public disorder in an industrial dispute. Home Office files released 3 decades later showed Clement was wrong. Striking miners at Orgreave had horses and dogs used against them and which ACPO justified because of the ‘potential for disorder’.

Mansfield immediately sought the manual’s disclosure. This was resisted although the judge did order some pages to be provided including those on use of arrest squads, mounted police and the deployment of shields and truncheons. MP Tony Benn’s attempts request for a Parliamentary debate on the manual were refused and decades later the full contents of the manual remain secret.

Such levels of secrecy had earlier been employed in 1968 when the SDS spy cops                                                         began to embed themselves in the anti-war movement before later lodging themselves in other movements where they collected information on tens of thousands of citizens, few of whom were committed to anything except peaceful, legal protests and campaigns.

Knowing that their new powers had been instigated by the home secretary and his department for the government’s political ends meant that senior police officers could prioritise these brutal new powers over any thoughts for more liberal policing.

At the Stockport Messenger group in Warrington in 1983, members of the National Graphical Association took strike action to defend their jobs and the right to belong to a trade union.

They were to become the guinea pigs in the tactical uses of the Public Order Manual of Tactical Options and Related Matters. It was to be a terrifying experience for trade unionists who defied the new anti-union laws by picketing, not at the place of work where the dispute in which 6 workers had been sacked, but at a new plant where the work had been transferred to by Eddie Shah, a maverick entrepreneur who was backed by the Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil.

Early on Wednesday 30 November 1983, up to 4,000 pickets, who were infiltrated by the SDS, were opposed by over 1,450 police officers. When the police instructed television crews to ‘turn off the lights’ the police then charged the crowd on 3 separate occasions . Two police Range Rovers were driven at high speed into the pickets, some of whom were kicked and hit with batons as they lay on the ground. The use of vehicles had been authorised in the Public Order Manual. Tony Burke and many others suspected the police had the full weight of the state behind them but recalls, “People didn’t necessarily believe they would go this far.” The union made a complaint against ACPO-rank officers but it took two years before the NGA received the not unexpected news that the complaints were not upheld.

It was to be the same when striking print workers, who were infiltrated by spy cop Bob Lambert, at Wapping, made complaints about the violent behaviour of the Met in relation to their actions outside Rupert Murdoch’s new printing plant in East London during the year long dispute in the mid-80s.

On this occasion the Criminal Prosecution Service viewed the actions of twenty-six police officers as so serious that they were charged. Yet when they appeared at committal hearings in the magistrate’s court before resident magistrate Ronald Bartle, former Tory candidate, an audacious defence submission that a fair trial was not possible because of delays in getting the first case to court was accepted.

Bartle in his book Bow Street Beak claimed the ‘judiciary is independent of the executive’ and yet the foreword to the work was written by his lifelong friend Lord Hurd, the Home Secretary during the Wapping strike who had privately met police commissioner Sir Peter Imbert in December 1988 in an attempt to stop the prosecutions.

All 26 Wapping Officers had their cases thrown out and walked away scot-free. Calls for a public inquiry into policing operations were dismissed.

Violence against demonstrators continued when tens of thousands assembled in London on Saturday, 31 March 1990 to voice opposition to the much-hated flat-rate Poll Tax that was not based upon ability to pay. In the weeks leading up to the event there had been 6,000 nationwide protests against it and yet the police refused to redirect the march away from the much smaller Trafalgar Square, which takes around 60,000 people, to Hyde Park. Following the march, during which trouble began after thousands were funnelled into a space that was nowhere near large enough and horses were ridden into a sit-down protest outside Downing Street, a police report suggested there were 40,000 there when it was closer to 300,000. The full findings of a  report by the Home Office and senior police officers on the poll tax riot has never been made public.

According to Foot and Livingstone it is not unusual for the police to underestimate numbers on demonstrations as this then makes it appear that that only the committed, hard core activist have attended and that, consequently, the movement is not a mass one with widespread public support as was clearly the case with the Poll Tax movement.

Other protests examined by the authors including the Battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge when over 500 travellers were confronted by the police in 1985, the Welling anti-racist protest in 1993 when the police closed off all avenues of escape for a crowd exceeding 60,000, the Kettling of anti-capitalist demonstrators in 2001 and at the G20 Protest in 2009 under New Labour, which had revealed it was happy enough to give the police more powers when it abstained when in opposition to the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill that was aimed at abolishing raves.

Blair’s Labour did not repeal any of the Tory policing laws including those that gave police a vast array of new powers against protestors under the Public Order Act 1986. During its 13 years in government, New Labour brought in a criminal law for every day they were in office. This included one outlawing unauthorised protests near Parliament.

In more recent year’s mass movements have emerged to challenge environmental destruction, racism and sexism and in the last 6-9 months the number of strikes by trade unionists has mushroomed. Extinction Rebellion protestors who engaged in October 2019 in peaceful sit-down protests were confronted with a London-wide ban. The High Court ruled that the blanket ban was unlawful. Earlier in April 2019, 700 Extinction Rebellion protestors were arrested for occupying parts of Oxford Street in an event that was peaceful.

Protest groups such CND have been found to have been listed as potential terrorists by South East Counter Terrorism Police.

According to Livingstone and Foot “this state creep was followed by a move towards totalitarianism with the introduction in 2021 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, including sweeping provisions that can outlaw any assemblies and processions deemed ‘noisy’ or which might cause ‘serious unease, alarm or distress’.

These draconian measures were introduced by Home Secretary Priti Patel even without consulting the Police Federation. None of which indicates the police are set to uphold the rights to protest as on 13 March 2021 the Met Police unceremoniously cleared a peaceful vigil by hundreds of women who felt unsafe on their streets and were paying their respects to Sarah Everard, who was murdered by a serving Met police office.

A day later the Labour Party, which had abstained on an earlier bill giving spy cops greater immunity to break the law, indicated it would oppose rather than abstain on the Police, Crime and Sentencing and Courts Bill. It was nevertheless voted through by a 96-seat majority (359-263) and it became law on April 28 this year.